Power Color HD 7990 Devil 13 is the first card to combine two Tahiti XT graphics processors onto a single PCB. We must say we expected AMD to come up with the card first, but it wasn’t the case and many partners are already preparing to launch their own HD 7990 cards. In fact, HIS’ HD 7970 X2 is almost done, so Power Color’s Devil 13 will soon get a worthy opponent from its own family.

The Devil 13’s fiercest adversary though is the GTX 690, which turned out superior in quite a few fields. When it comes to performance, there are no clear cut winners, at least not as decisively as we used to see. The Devil 13 HD 7990 will wipe the floor with the GTX 690 in some games, but the GTX 690 repays the “favor” in others. Nvidia’s champ leads when it comes to silence, consumption and driver stability.

We got the impression that the GTX 690’s SLI runs better than the HD 7990’s CrossFire. However, the latest application profile solves certain CrossFire issues in some games, most notable of which in our case was Crysis 2.

The Devil 13 HD 7990 runs at 925MHz for the GPU and 1375MHz for GDDR5 memory, but switching on turbo BIOS will overclock the GPU to 1000MHz. We didn’t expect much when it comes to further overclocking potential, but overclocking the GPU to 1125MHz was a breeze.

Of course, all that muscle comes at a price and the Devil 13 HD 7990 is the hungriest card we’ve had on our test lately. Due to high power demands, the Devil 13 has three 8-pin power connectors.

The triple-slot cooler looks powerful and does a pretty good job, but we were slightly disappointed with noise levels. The fans, three of them to be exact, are noticeably louder than the GTX 690’s single fan.

The Devil 13 HD 7990 can drive five monitors (up to three DVI displays thanks to bundled active mini-DP-to-DVI dongle).

Power Color’s HD 7990 that runs at 900MHz (slower than the Devil 13) costs around €880, which is what the cheapest GTX 690 goes for. The Devil 13 HD 7990, with its turbo overclocking, is priced €50 higher.

Power Color made and launched the HD 7990 on its own and this effort should not go unrewarded. It is thanks to this company that we got to see a Radeon with two Tahiti XT graphics processors, while the GTX 690 got itself a worthy opponent.